Despite different welfare state regulation and re-organisations of home help services, over a long period household tasks dominated the range of delivered services and the corresponding requirements on the employees. The recruitment basis was mainly women without formal qualifications looking for employment possibilities after a family break of a year or more. No noticeable step of professionalisation of the occupation took place until the 1980s. Traditional housework was then replaced by tasks promoting rehabilitation and active participation in social life for the elderly people The catchword became 'help to self-help'. The development of the new tasks ran parallel to a newly defined work situation. With the
advent of long-term contracts, longer working hours and formal occupational training home help services were to gain more occupational status. This newly defined occupation was intended to create a more attractive work area for the better educated younger generation. Similar to social work and health care, home help services for the elderly were to be based on scientific knowledge. Today, the higher positioned employees usually have a degree and have gained professional status (Johansson, 1997). Thus, at the end of the 1980s, the efforts made to establish a more professional home help service resulted in a new field of professional work which was characterised by co-operation between some highly-qualified (mostly) women who made up about 10% of the staff and a large number of low or medium qualified women paid at the rate of equally qualified women in other areas of the labour-market.2 The establishment of this new mode of delivering social care was only possible within the context of a general acceptance of public social services which meant paying high taxes. The views of the elderly clearly demonstrate a corresponding change towards this new form of social
care. While in the 1960s they had preferred to be cared for by relatives, in the 1980s, they assessed the public social care as their favourite form (Johansson, 1997).